In the dark and mysterious world of Closure, only what you see exists. Manipulate lights to phase objects in and out of reality in this multiple-award-winning puzzle game. Play as a strange spider-like demon who explores the stories of three human characters through beautiful, eerie environments such as a decrepit factory, a murky...

Buy Closure

Recommended By Curators

"Showed at PAX Prime 2012 - Solve puzzles in a world where only what you see is truly present."

Reviews

IGN: 8.5/10 - "Stylish and engaging, Closure’s thoughtful and pensive approach to the puzzle genre should be applauded."

1-UP: A- - "The game is crammed with challenges and collectibles that will hold your attention well passed the expiration date of most downloadable titles."

Joystiq: 4/5 - "Closure offers up a unique puzzle experience set in a wonderfully moody environment caught somewhere between the designs of Dan Paladin and Edward Gorey."

About This Game

In the dark and mysterious world of Closure, only what you see exists. Manipulate lights to phase objects in and out of reality in this multiple-award-winning puzzle game. Play as a strange spider-like demon who explores the stories of three human characters through beautiful, eerie environments such as a decrepit factory, a murky forest, an abandoned carnival, and the strange, surreal realm that connects them together.

System Requirements

Windows

Mac OS X

Minimum:

OS:Windows 7/Vista/XP

Processor:Intel Core 2 Duo or higher

Memory:512 MB RAM

Graphics:512MB with support for OpenGL 2.0, older or integrated cards may not work

Guide your little person up the ladder, across the gaps in the floor and out the door. But if you can't see it, It doesn't exist. Walk off into the darkness and fall into oblivion. Wall lamps can be rotated to reveal floors and glowing orbs can be carried to light your way. Some doors need to be unlocked with a key and you can carry only one thing at a time. Appropriate for a game about light and shadow the odd art design is done entirely in black and white.

The levels were a bit on the easy side, But I enjoyed the light/dark aspect, music and art design. Things are kept at a minimum, Though perhaps too minimal. I think more interesting things could have been done with the games gimmick. There's no story in the game. Just different themes for the three groups of levels. Which is fine as the game is fairly abstract anyway, But filling out the vignettes more would have been nice.

Closure is a 2D platform puzzle game, where everything that has light on it exists. Everything that doesn't have lights will make you fall down. If you fall down to the bottom of the screen you will die. That sounds really simple as a mechanic, but is really well executed in the game. With a great look at detail. The thing you have to do is in every level is that you have to open a door to get to the next level. So you for instance have to find a key or get some object activated to open the door. You will be really challenged by many of puzzles. Some puzzles also got me really stuck for a while. What I like in the levels are the many different puzzles with new objects. The design and the sounddesign combine well within the game, working well with the game's aesthetics. The only bad thing I can say about the game was that at the third stage of the game the puzzles where strangely enough really easy. When compared to the stages before that. (Maybe it was just me.) Closure is instead of many other puzzle games I experienced, packed with many hours of gameplay. (12 hours ) Closure is also one of the few games that convinced me to replay some levels over again to get all the collectables. Which is challenging.

In short: A puzzle game with many hours of play where only anything in the light exists.

Closure is a puzzle game with a simple premise - What you cant see really isnt there. I thought this was a cool premise

Most of the puzzles were very easy some even purely atmospheric. However many times i fell threw annoying small holes in the ground or messed up on something really minute causing me to replay the whole level. This game was still very fun despite being really annoying.

The final level set and secret bonuses were mostly pretty challenging and enjoyable. Closure has no replay value but the over 100 levels should last a decent amount of time themselves. There is also a developer commentary unlocked when you complete the game any% I found it fairly interesting

i got this game in the 1$ humble bundle not going to comment on the price overall i thought it was a great game buy it if you like an atmospheric puzzler

B&W platformer with a dark atmosphere. Play with lights & shadows, tons of possibilities. Just began trying to speedrun it, and there are some amazing shortcuts. Ambiant music is quite soft, has a nice ring, and not too tedious, even after listening to it for couple hours straight !

A very challenging puzzle-platformer presented in black and white to take advantage of the shadows.

Whatever the light does not touch does not exist. Expertly guide the light from one side of the map to the next to progress to the next room.It is not as easy as it sounds, believe me.This is trial and error in every sense of the word.You are going to die. Alot.

Closure is a pretty clever black & white puzzle game. The game revolves around lightness and darkness--the world around you only exists when light shines upon it. So you can literally walk through walls and fall through platforms by removing the light shining upon them. Some of the levels are very simple but many of the later levels get quite tricky.

The initial learning curve required a lot of trial-and-error to struggle through. However, once I fully understood how to use the light correctly, the game became much easier making many of the later levels seem simple compared to the early ones. I think the game would have been improved by a rewind mechanic because if you fail, you have to start each level from scratch.

But this one, turned out to be exceptionally good. It's a dark, surreal adventure that introduces rather interesting and involving light-darkness mechanics.

Only what you see in light exists. What is shadowed by darkness does not, and you will fall into it. This creates as you can well imagine, creative gameplay posibilities. But in all honesty, the game for me is probably too hard to ever complete, yet it seems to be accesible for the first few levels and the atmosphere is amazing. You explore 3 distinct environments: A Factory, A Murky Forest and A Circus.

It has good music and each of the three characters that "morth" into your spidery-like creature have a story of their own, alleogrically presented.

What if there is only what you can see? What if nothing exist in the dark and existence is only in the light? Cannot go through the wall? You can if you don't see it. ;) It's a brilliant concept and if you like puzzle games and unique ideas you will love this game. And wait till you hear the music and see all the art behind. Go for it, buy it, enjoy it.

To start: I used to add a header to these reviews, but since it often made the review too long to submit, I've opted to leave it on my Backloggery page.

Gameplay: I'd like to start out this review by quoting a card from everyone's favorite I'm-A-Terrible-Person Card Game, Cards Against Humanity: "'Closure, a game about using light to create platforms which were once obscured in the dark so that you can complete the puzzle!' Awesome in theory, messy in practice." Yes, as you might assume from that, this isn't going to be the kindest of reviews (at least as far as the puzzle design goes). You've no doubt been drawn to this game by its honestly quite impressive art style and maybe it's really excellent sound design (I'll talk about this later in the review, so don't worry), but this is unfortunately one of those cases in which the game is tons of style, with not much substance.

The main gimmick of this game is that you have a stage which is almost entirely shrouded in darkness. Through various means you can shine light on the level to reveal portions of the stage. However, if a light is shining on a platform, not all of that platform may be revealed. For example, there is a puzzle relatively early on that shows you that you can indeed go through what was once solid wall through good placement of the light source. These light sources that I'm referring to come in a few different shapes: glowing orbs which emit radial light and can be embedded in things like blocks and wheels, lamps which emit linear light, and supernatural phenomena that light up for no reason and with no prior indication whenever light shines on wherever they may be because they feel like it. Fortunately, the last light source isn't used too often, but it can be a little irksome.

The lack of light for all of these puzzles does great for the atmosphere, but it gradually becomes remarkably tedious to deal with, especially with stages that involve swimming. Typically, the first thing you do whenever you enter a stage is you pick up a light orb and you fumble about the stage effectively memorizing where things are; after which you continue to solve the puzzle. This brings me to one of my bigger complaints about this game. This is somewhat of a personal design philosophy as far as puzzle games go, but I believe that puzzles should have inherent, easy repeatability, so that the game becomes more of a factor of thought rather than a factor of skill or precision. While there are some levels that recognize this and have a pretty "locked-in" way of solving them, a lot of levels in this game have a degree of imprecision in which the puzzle becomes more of an issue of item placement than an issue of problem solving (oh man, my solution worked but I placed the light orb two pixels too short so I miss the jump/render the puzzle unsolvable).

This issue becomes even further compounded whenever the biggest issue of this game is revealed: every time you die, you restart the puzzle. This may not be so bad, but when puzzles later on take anywhere from four to five minutes to solve, the whole thing falls apart very quickly. In fact, I'll readily admit to not completing this game because of 4-6, a level that is pretty much a checklist of things that I really don't like about the puzzle design ethos of this game: imprecise jumps, loads of item juggling (oh yeah, that's another problem with this game: there's a LOT of item juggling), having to cycle through the stage multiple times to solve it, and finally, the lack of ability to see the entire stage so that you can end up screwing yourself over without having all the information. I can definitely say that this is a game that I won't be replaying anytime soon (if ever). There are some neat ideas in there, but they get reused so often (seriously, how many times am I gonna have to do the light elevator?) that they just become tedious. Not a game to be played for gameplay. "Closure! Awesome in theory, messy in practice." 4/10.

Story: I'm... not sure about this one, to be perfectly honest. As you might expect, the game is written in a very surreaistic way, somewhat akin to Limbo but not necessarily as laden with symbolism. It goes through three different characters, but I'm not sure if they're necessarily related, and if they are, what purpose they play in the story. The ending doesn't really help as far as explanation goes. I dunno; I'll probably be thinking about this one for a day or two after writing this review. Because I'm just that dang unsure as to what's going on with the story, I won't bother rating it. Who knows; maybe the game's story is a Dadaist fever dream and any attempts to read into the story are inherently futile? It's... probably not, but there's always that possibility!

Graphics: Well, it's obvious where 45% of the game's effort went. It's another one of those instances in which I'm sure I don't need to tell you how great this game looks. I just wish the stages weren't so damned dark so that I could appreciate all the effort put into the backgrounds. Ah well. What I can tell you is that this game fullscreened to my native resolution on launch without any intervention, which is a big plus in my books. There isn't much else as far as graphical settings go, but there don't need to be; this is a 2D sprite-based game with, at most, some pixel shading. As long as you've got some sort of pixel shader capability, you should be able to run this game no problems. So yeah, this one's pretty cut and dry. It looks and runs spectacularly. 5/5.

Sound: Well, it's obvious where the other 45% of the game's effort went. No seriously, DAT SOUNDTRACK. The soundtrack is absolutely perfect for this game; it's loud and chaotic at times while other times being more ominous and brooding. Both extremes are captured fantastically, and I'd easily recommend picking up the soundtrack for this game. As far as its presence in the gameplay experience, it can get a little tiresome hearing the same song or two on loop throughout the entire area, but the first time hearing that song... so good. The sound design is fantastic as well. It's just too bad that the puzzle design takes you right out of that atmosphere. 5/5.

Overall scores are: 4/0/5/5; cumulative score of 7.0/10. On an objective level, I give this game a Recommended (if the score is greater than 5, then recommended; if the score is less than 5, not recommended; if it's a tie, use the discretion of "will I ever play this again?"). On a subjective level, I can't recommend it, and will instead recommend just getting the soundtrack and watching a Let's Play of it.

Closure has a unique identity in aesthetic and core mechanic, but the game itself is more frustrating than fun. The primary issue is that the puzzle solving in Closure is just too dependent on trail and error. Rather than allowing you to explore the light and dark mechanic to invent creative solutions, Closure equates success with uncovering the singular and often painstakingly tedious accepted pathway to your goal. In this way, Closure is more strict puzzle game than puzzle-platformer, and accordingly I'd only recommended it to diehard puzzle fans.

I suppose the concept is pretty original, yes, but I think that's for a reason... there's just no way it could've worked. A puzzle platformer where the puzzles are easy and the platforming is clunky. Spend several minutes on tedious puzzles only to fail a jump and have to restart the entire level. Whoops, that looked solid, but apparently it isn't. Item babysitting is really fun, especially when the entire game is focused around it.

Sigh. I can't be nice to this game, there's not much enjoyable about it.

The "puzzles" in this game are not ever too challenging. The hardest part is figuring out whether or not what you're trying to do is actually possible, since it's often ambiguous. Move speed is slow, jump is barely passable in height. It's not really a very good platforming engine, and the physics are often clunky. There's some decent brainteasers in the game though so I'm not going to pretend it's devoid of real puzzle design, but the tricky stuff is tricky for the wrong reasons. A lot of the puzzles seem to want to make you explore the area a bit and then restart because you did something wrong while exploring. And there's not a lot of variety; lots of the same things over and over with no clever twists on them.

The game's also way too punishing for how long some of the puzzles go on. Way too easy to jump up onto a box but WHOOPS you forgot to leave your orb next to the box so it plummets into the abyss. Fail a jump you're not sure you can make and WHOOPS back to the start. Losing keys also happens frequently. And the physics lead to some fun times, enjoy your accidentally crushed orb please and thank you. This is especially annoying in the levels that are comprised of several smaller puzzles instead of one big one. Screw up one puzzle and you have to redo all the others too, even though there's no good reason to. The puzzles are already tedious enough without the game forcing you to play them over and over again to figure out everything about them.

In short, it's not fun. At all.

The art style is okay, though the lack of color results in everything looking pretty samey after a while. The music's way too overblown for the game and there's far too few different music tracks. The game has too many levels, could've stood to have less considering the lack of variety, it just feels overlong. Especially when there are levels without any puzzle to be found; not kidding. I think this would've been better with a Braid-like rewind system to avoid the tedium of having to replay everything whenever you screw up a puzzle, honestly. Even if it's a "ripoff" that way, well, at least it'd be more fun to play.

Not recommended at all for either puzzle fans or platforming fans, there's far better out there than this.

CLOSURE is a black and white alienish platform puzzle game where the world exists because of light. Without light, there is only nothing and I mean nothing, if you try to jump onto a platform that doesn't have light near it, you will fall through the world. If you are swimming and your light floats away, you will drop out of the world without it. Solid walls become jumps when there is no light on them. The object of each of the almost 100 levels is basically to make it to the door at the end. You can pick up lit orbs, you can put lit orbs into carriers that will carry them. This leads to some really interesting platform mechanics, such as moving lights turn into elevators when normally they'd be solid walls. You can put orbs into transporters that will make 2 areas lit instead of 1. There are push boxes, push rollers that will of course roll, lit push boxes, lamps that you can adjust to cast light onto different areas and so on. This is a unique, enjoyable, atmospheric, immerse game, but I have a feeling that once you're done, you're done. They made a really alien world here and the music is awesome and belongs in a suspense drama. After the tutorial levels when the game opens up, the music eases up so its not as intense. Very worth a play through, I own it a few different ways, Steam, GOG, did I mention its free for Playstation Plus members?